Tencent has reportedly signed a contract to access 100,000 GPUs via Oracle's cloud platform.

As reported by the Financial Times, and citing two people familiar with the matter, Tencent has signed a five-year lease across multiple Oracle data centers in Southeast Asia.

The lease will enable Tencent to access Oracle's GPUs in the data centers, which are not available in China due to the US' export controls on the hardware, and is hoped to help Tencent to advance its AI models and agentic tools.

The sources told the FT that the deal was valued at around $7bn, with Tencent paying 30 percent upfront.

DCD has contacted Oracle and Tencent for comment.

The Chinese cloud, social media and gaming company reported a negative cash flow of RMB 13.8 billion ($2.06bn) for its second quarter, which, according to the FT, is the company's first negative figure in more than a decade. Speaking on that, CFO John Lo said at the time of the earnings call that this was "reflecting large AI infrastructure capex and AI-related prepayments," and that "excluding the prepayments for compute procurement, free cash flow would have been RMB 37.6bn ($5.61bn)," making the difference in the realm of $7-8bn.

Tencent president Martin Lau said: "We're comfortable in making significant investments in AI because not only is there a substantial upside potential, there is also clear downside protection. The AI investments we're making are mostly in AI infrastructure, and in the worst case, which we do not believe would happen, we can choose to rent that infrastructure out at cost recovery or even better prices via Tencent Cloud if needed."

While that is a possibility, executives made it clear that the current intention for that compute is for "training bigger and better Hunyuan models," followed by inferencing workloads and later to rent out as bare metal or via Model-as-a-Service offerings.

This is consistent with the company's previously stated strategy, with Tencent saying that it had focused on developing its internal services. In May 2026, Tencent CSO James Mitchell said: "Looking through the rest of this year, as the supply of China-designed GPUs progressively ramps up, we'll be remedying that situation; we will be making more capacity available in Tencent Cloud, and consequently driving up Tencent Cloud's rate of expansion. That's where the trade-off has been made: we have been consciously late to monetize the AI opportunity through Tencent Cloud because we've been simultaneously supporting a number of AI initiatives internally."